


To Burn

by LiterallyThePresident



Series: A Desolate Web [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Desolation! Jacobi, Minor Body Horror, Statement Format, The Desolation, Web! Kepler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 19:43:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18350420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiterallyThePresident/pseuds/LiterallyThePresident
Summary: Statement of Daniel Jacobi, avatar of the Desolation





	To Burn

Statement of Daniel Jacobi, age unknown, regarding an explosion at his workplace and the subsequent mental shift that followed. Statement given January fifth, twenty-fifteen. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.

 _Statement_ _begins_

“It wasn’t always like this, you know. Explosions, fire, it didn’t used to be an obsession for me. I never had this fixation, this _need_ to burn, anything and everything. To feel the heat and the rush and the knowledge that I am ending lives, holding my breath as the very air erupts. No, I used to be just a regular tech. A guy who built bombs more for the paycheck than any true passion. Funny, but back then I really thought I was passionate about demolitions. I was wrong, of course. I had no idea what true passion felt like. How it sears you from the inside out and hollows you out until there’s nothing left but smoke and ash. How, in the absence of it, the burn of whiskey is the closest thing to a substitute you can get. And it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

I see you now, Archivist, trying not to stare at the scar that takes up the left side of my face. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I was gifted with it the day the lightless flame embraced me. Ugh, listen to me, being all poetic. Kepler would be cackling with glee if he could see me. But I’m getting off track. It started in a demolitions lab, when I was small fish in a big oily ocean.

I had two primary coworkers, Stevens and Park. I liked them well enough, although they trusted too easily. Park had a wife and two kids, with a third in the way. He never shut up about them. And Stevens was up in line for a promotion, and how he beamed with pride every day because of it. They were alright, but I’ll tell you a secret, Archivist. The Desolation had already started wooing me long before that fateful day, filling my dreams with bleak landscapes and whispering such sweet nothings every time I lit a match. That day on the ballistics lab, when I gave myself to the Desolation fully, it was no accident. Not like everyone believes. No, when I saw how close Stevens and Park were to the presumed disarmed bomb, talking so happily about their lives, their futures, the flame of my cigarette lighter told me exactly what I should do. My coworkers asked me what I was doing as I held my hand over the detonator, but the trusting idiots made no move to stop me. Poor jokester Jacobi with his head in the clouds, poor silly man who laughed too loudly and loved too easily. He would never do anything to hurt them.

The explosion was was like a living being, a  _heavenly_ being, a fiend angelic. You hear stories of how the biblical angels appeared as massive wheels of blinding fire, well I can tell you that the angels, Heaven itself, could never compare. For a brief moment, everything was pure, perfect white. A moment frozen in time, the fire and sound blocking everything except the maddening anticipation. And then time caught up and everything was chaos. The blast hit me, and I was... What’s that quote from Les Mis? ‘Struck to the bone in a moment of breathless delight.’ Even as my flesh screamed in agony, my bones rending in their sockets, I felt a joy so fierce I wondered if it was possible to die of ecstasy. 

Stevens and Park didn’t get it, didn’t _comprehend_. Their dying screams were wasted on agony, neither of them could fathom the gift they’d been given. Two lives snuffed out in an instant, their candles burned out by a wave of flame so pure it brought tears to my eyes, although that may have also been the blissful pain. I was almost jealous of them, but I knew somehow I was only getting started. I was grinning ear to blistering ear as they hauled me to the hospital, my skin bubbling and pulling away with their hands. The very memory of their expressions of horror and revulsion still make me smile today.

I found myself in that explosion. Since that day, I have not known peace. Since that day, I am whole. I am purified. Content. I _burn_. All the time. And I _like_ it.

And then the Web found me. It’s avatar was beautiful, his skin so perfect for blistering. He makes the prettiest sounds when I brand my hand into his flesh, and still he calls me his. I don’t know if us being brought together was coincidence, or the Web orchestrating an alliance, but I don’t care. Kepler is mine, and I am his. I light his silky strands aflame and breath the smoke into his mouth, his black eyes dance in the light of my flame, and he gathers me close and binds me to him, and we are so perfect I could cry.

It wasn’t always like this. But it is now. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

 _Statement_ _ends_. 

Hm. I uh.... Hm. This is a bit unprecedented. It’s unusual for an avatar to actively seek us out to give a statement. Though I would never call the Desolation uninteresting, I am intrigued by this alleged alliance between the Web and the Desolation. It could be cause for some concern in the future, if the two entities join together.

The situation requires monitoring, but at the moment there’s nothing more I can get from it. When Basira reached out to Mister Jacobi for a follow-up, she was informed rather rudely by his current employer that he was in space. The employer refused to elaborate further. It appears that, as of right now, we’ll have to let this one sit in the back burner for a while. No pun intended.

 _End_ _recording_.

**Author's Note:**

> God, this is a series now, huh


End file.
